Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? T...hat Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

But could a dream send up through onion fumesIts white and violet, fight with fried potatoes...And yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall,Flutter, or sing an aria down these roomsEven if we were willing to let it in,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I did toy with the idea of doing a cook-book.... The recipes were to be the routine ones: how to make dry toast, instant coffee, h...earts of lettuce and brownies. But as an added attraction, at no extra charge, my idea was to put a fried egg on the cover. I think a lot of people who hate literature but love fried eggs would buy it if the price was right.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The mythology of science asserts that with many different scientists all asking their own questions and evaluating the answers ind...ependently, whatever personal bias creeps into their individual answers is cancelled out when the large picture is put together. This might conceivably be so if scientists were women and men from all sorts of different cultural and social backgrounds who came to science with very different ideologies and interests. But since, in fact, they have been predominantly university-trained white males from privileged social backgrounds, the bias has been narrow and the product often reveals more about the investigator than about the subject being researched.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through whi...ch we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

English people apparently queue up as a sort of hobby. A family man might pass a mild autumn evening by taking the wife and kids t...o stand in the cinema queue for a while and then leading them over for a few minutes in the sweetshop queue and then, as a special treat for the kids, saying "Perhaps we've time to have a look at the Number Thirty-One bus queue before we turn in."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

When it came to poetry, my father was not an absolutist. Pie was his favorite subject for a couplet, but every three or four weeks... he would write about something else--perhaps a couplet like "'Eat your food,' gently said Mom to little son Roddy. 'If you don't, I will break every bone in your body.'"The next day he would be back to pies -- "Mrs. Trillin's pecan pie, so nutritious and delicious Will make a wild man mild and a mild man vicious."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »